Nobara Linux on an Oryx Pro oryp4

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Heyo! I have an older model Oryx Pro from System76 that I obtained fairly cheaply, prior to being laid off from the company with a few other people. Let’s run Eggy’s Nobara distro on it!

Sorry for the blurry photo, but the first installation attempt was seemingly a failure, due to a bad USB drive. I went ahead and burned the Gnome version of Nobara Linux (based on Fedora) to a different USB, slapped it in and the install went off without a hitch!

Once booted back up after the install completed, the Nobara team’s point-and-click installer for media codecs popped up. I went ahead and agreed to it, then a follow-up pop-up point-and-click installer came up for the NVIDIA drivers required to use this Oryx Pro oryp4 model’s GTX 1070.

I believe, outside of NVIDIA being pre-installed in Pop!_OS, this is the best experience I’ve had with a Linux distro to date when it comes to installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. This Oryx Pro is the only piece of tech I have, besides the Corsair One Pro I’m selling, that still has NVIDIA hardware in it. Moving forward, I’ll mainly be sticking to Intel/AMD hardware for ease of use in open-source computing, but this will be a great spare should my Dell G5 mess up at any point…though I think that isn’t likely.

Since it seems Nobara is handling the NVIDIA driver stuff fine with their auto-installer, I went ahead and installed some additions I usually make to my Nobara gnome installs via this script I have on github. Above you’ll also see me using their point-and-click solution to install the Xbox One controller firmware. Note that I had previously installed a few things on battery before the older battery cut out, so now I’m reinstalling the controller firmware. After that, my Xbox One wired controller worked fine!

Just a few last things needed and we’re good to go! That said, it looks like I would have to fully install the System76 nvidia driver package for Fedora here if I wanted active switchable graphics, as it looks to be that there’s no menu for choosing whether you want to be on Intel/NVIDIA graphics from the power menu in the top right of Gnome.

Above, you’ll see I also went ahead and installed some benchmarking tools to test the temperatures with the stock thermal paste that System76 and their repair partners apply after replacing system mainboards. Looks like the temps got between the 70-80 celsius range before the cpu began thermal throttling, as the fans were on full bore the whole time so there wasn’t much that could change in terms of airflow. Let’s see if we can increase that headroom a bit! I’m going to go ahead and repaste the CPU as well as the GPU with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut to see if that makes a difference.

After the Kryonaut was applied, I re-ran the CPU benchmark for a few seconds/minutes to see how the termperatures were looking this time. After that, I ran a GPU benchmark as well. Threw a little neofetch in here too, so people could see what kernel I’m running on Nobara here from the fsync repo that Eggy uses. I’ll be keeping this Oryx Pro as a backup gaming machine, and might end up replacing the Upcycled Guest Gaming Build based around an older Xeon with this as it will take up less space next to the workbench. From what I’m seeing here, the kryonaut only gave slightly better temperatures in this test case. Regardless, it’s nice to have fresh paste!

I also have a Thinkpad T400 or T500 that’s fully librebooted as of a few years ago. Might update libreboot on that and list that in my projects-for-sale page if anyone would be interested in that.

Used Projects For Sale! (also Decky Loader news)

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Greetings, fellow nerdlings. I’ve finally got the store page for my site up and running! While Squarespace makes it easy to set up websites and stores, I ended up futzing around with my images and where to put descriptions for too long, so it took about two months lol.

The store page can be accessed clicking the link above or by clicking the Projects For Sale tab at the top of my site. Help me sell these machines to people that are in need, as well as fund other fun projects along the way!

In other updates, I’ve also had to re-image my Steam Deck due to breaking the UI too often with Decky Loader plugins. It seems that the current pre-alpha build here of Decky Loader is the only one that was booting for me when I was running the Beta channel OS of SteamOS 3 on my deck. That said, the pre-release build was crashing fairly often and I may have installed one too many plugins. Now that I’ve reinstalled a bunch of games and made sure the Chrome shortcut in Deck UI is heading to XCloud properly again, I think I’ll just stick to the VibrantDeck extension that makes your screen look a lot better.

Ignore the clutter on that workbench, I’m about to replace the guest gaming desktop’s wifi adapter with a little nub as well as replace a touchpad on a T440p soon.

Sorry if the above image here seems blurry. This was from when I headed over to the home of GloriousEggroll and we finished working on updating the BIOS for the Upcycle V2 build that I’m now selling in my Projects For Sale store here. We had to upgrade the BIOS about 5 times- due to the many iterations that have been released- and now it’s working perfectly with the faster RAM and GPU that were added. More information via the store listing HERE.

That said, I think I’ll keep the older, likely-less-worth-money Upcycle V1 build that has an old i7-3xxx processor and Radeon 6770 1GB video card, as I don’t think there will be as much interest in buying that as there will be for the Ryzen 5-based Upcycle V2.

The Upcycle V2 system is now back at my place, safe and sound. Just need to re-mount the PCIe-screw-cover that goes into the back and we’re good to go for sale. Note that I’ll be selling it with no OS installed, unless the new owner wants a specific OEM-Installable Linux distro installed. That’ll be the policy for all my hardware, as I won’t be paying for Windows licenses.

After I got the games reinstalled on Deck, and ProtonGE builds installed via ProtonUP for games like Shatterline and Halo MCC, I started running through a Brotato run again as well haha. This is basically a single-player equivalent to Vampire Survivors, except completely written in Godot which is pretty cool. Godot is an open source game engine, and it’s nice to see games on Steam utilizing it.

I also received my Pibox recently! I’m looking forward to working on hosting things once I can get two 4TB 2.5” drives for it. I have quite a bit I’d like to host on it…

Nifty Utilities + The Store

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Hello there everyone! It’s been an interesting month over at casa de la Seibz. Lots of work has gone into fixing up my condo here and there where needed, and replacing light fixtures etc.

Recently I re-imaged my Steam Deck, and made an associated issue for my steam script project over here. I’ll probably work on that more in November as things begin to cool down outside quite a bit and I’m home more often.

I’ve recently been messing around with RetroArch from Steam, installed on my freshly-imaged Steam Deck to see what, if any, changes have been made. I also found a great script from a community member over here for running in Desktop Mode. That script will make sure all available RetroArch cores are installed to your RetroArch install, since not all of them are available on Steam currently.

This helps a ton in enabling Gamecube/Wii emulation along with ScummVM and a few other RetroArch cores that weren’t natively available out of the box after installing it from Steam.

I’ll add below the terminal commands I used to run that script after going into Desktop Mode on Deck and opening Konsole.

cd
wget https://github.com/icculus/twisty-little-utilities/blob/main/steamdeck-retroarch-download-all-cores.sh
bash steamdeck-retroarch-download-all-cores.sh

If you haven’t pinned it to the task bar yet, if you dock the Steam Deck in Desktop Mode, the windows/super key on your keyboard will correspond with a KDE-start-menu equivalent, and then you can search for and open the Konsole terminal from there.

I’ve also done more testing with the inovato quadra, and this little guy definitely seems to be a great little machine for someone’s first internet-enabled desktop, or for emulating some N64/GBA games on portable monitors etc.

Having done some work on the Steam Deck script, I thought about moving my Guest Gaming Desktop’s (more info in a post here) Steam client to Beta mode, so you can just run updates on that Nobara install, and then jump into the new “gamepadui” Big Picture mode that has the Steam Deck UI enabled per the Beta channel now.

As I haven’t updated that desktop in a while, looks like we’re on a newer mesa and kernel release now too!

Soon I’ll have some more images up of my second upcycle desktop build, but a summary of the parts is below

  • Ryzen 5 3600

  • Asrock b350 pro4 motherboard

  • t-force vulcan z 3200mhz 16gb ram

  • XFX RX590 8GB Fat Boi edition

  • 512gb sabren rocket nvme

  • Montech air v100

More news on that build and the status of my store page to come! I’ll be selling that build, my previous upcycle build as well as some Thinkpads I’m working on fixing up to sell as well. Might have some other treats to sell there soon too!

Projects update; Steam Deck as a Laptop, T440p Refurbishing

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Hello there friendos! Recently I was going through the tech I have in my storage, and found a NexDock Touch! Niceu! Next, I thought why not use this with the Steam Deck to make it a laptop for work? Also, thinking of finishing up my refurbishing of a T440p soon.

I’ve always been a hardware junkie, so I love messing with new tech combos.

Once I jumped the Deck over to Desktop Mode, I went ahead and plugged in my NexDock Touch. I sat the Deck on the couch cushion next to me, and just the NexDock Touch as a laptop interface for the Deck’s Desktop Mode! Then, I went ahead and made a little one-time-run script that you could run from Konsole on the deck. I named it deckscript since I’m not good at names haha.

In the image above, you’ll see me installing openSUSE Tumbleweed here in a VM via the Boxes flatpak to check it out. That said, I mainly worked on that deckscript from Konsole on the Deck.

As you can see above, I’m now working on this from a desktop hub from jsaux that has my Deck plugged in. I’m doing further work on the deckscript and have also opened an issue to see if I can resolve the missing headers that are required for getting yay installed on Steam Deck, further enabling you to install stuff from the AUR. You know, packages you might use if using the Deck for work, like Slack.

In the case that the above asciinema embed doesn’t work, I’ve linked this sentence to head to my asciinema page. Made a recording of a first attempt to grab yay. Further information can be found on issue 1 for the deckscript. If any of you reading this would like to help out, I welcome all pull requests! Happy hacking on your Decks!

"Old Boi" build and Upcycle projects

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Hi there again! It’s been a while. Work and life are going as they usually go. Prepping to go on a road trip back to California in late August, perhaps I’ll sell some of my builds while there!

Building that last desktop during the shortages, along with a Xeon-based guest gaming pc have taken up my time recently. I’ll add those build links below.

As I’ve already completed my iteration of Eggy’s xeon-based budget build, I’ll mainly focus on the Old Boi build that I’ve been working on getting together for testing ReactOS. The “Upcycle V2” build I linked above on pcpartpicker will be a more-future-upgradeable AM4 build centering around a used A12 series processor along with the RX590 and a drive I had in storage.

For this Old Boi build, It was centered around an i5 processor I had in storage and the cost of “renewing” an old radeon 6770 1gb card I had. This will mainly be for testing older software or games, such as the open source ReactOS based on Windows NT, or possibly HaikuOS, a rewrite of BeOS from back in the day. Maybe this setup may end its days as a NixOS system, who knows?

Above we have an image from my workbench as I was testing to see how things are running. After testing some video output from the motherboard and from the Radeon 6770 card, I learned that the cheapo Raidmax 300W power supply would not be enough. I went on to get a better Thermaltake unit from the nearby Micro Center. Perhaps I’ll save that 300W one for a tiny build in the future that has RDNA2 or greater integrated graphics.

Next, on to the testing with a better-wattage PSU!

The system legitimately booted with a better PSU, a Thermaltake 600W of sorts I picked up at the local micro center. Glad to see the ol boi build booting up fine now! Next, I made sure to rip apart this old Radeon 6770 from circa 2011 to clean it out and then repaste it. The extender that this thing has on it, to fit into older style full tower cases, is a bit annoying. After some jiggling around though, everthing looked fine!

I don’t have too many other pictures of the process outside of this side shot of the finished build. The cables, this being a non-modular power supply, were a bit annoying to manage, so there’s a bit of a rats nest of cables around the area where a CD drive would go, but that’s fine. Only thing mounted up there is the 480gb sata SSD. Look how red ATI GPUs used to be!

On another note, I think this machine could use a back exhaust fan, as the case only came with an intake fan on the front and the hot air kind of wanders. Once I add an exhaust fan in the future, the temps will be stable and this will be perfect for testing older software!

Though my week of testing operating systems so far, though, I haven’t been able to get Windows XP or the open source ReactOS to properly boot, so this guy might end up running some distro with KDE themed like Windows 7 for now, to give the retro feel.

I’ll likely end up selling this along with a Thinkpad T440p I’m finishing up soon and a Thinkpad X230 that is incompatible with flashing coreboot.